If and when Robert DeNiro‘s performance as Jennifer Lawrence‘s dad in Joy results in Best Supporting Actor heat (and I know nothing about that), Dan Mazer‘s Dirty Grandpa (Lionsgate, 1.22.16) might get in the way. Maybe, possibly. DeNiro’s grandpa to Zac Efron, verbatim: “The greatest gift a grandson can give his grandfather is a hot college girl who wants to have unprotected sex with him before he dies.”

I wanted to chuckle at or…you know, quietly enjoy Jared Hess‘s Don Verdean (Lionsgate, theatrical/VOD 12.11), a satire of rightwing religious foolery and fraudulence. But it just wouldn’t let me go there, and I’m saying this as a fan of Sam Rockwell, who plays the titular character, a bullshit archeologist and discoverer of Biblical relics. The only good thing is New Zealand-based actor-comedian Jermaine Clement, who plays Boaz, a corruptible Israeli guide.

A New York-area research screening of Liza Johnson‘s Elvis & Nixon (Amazon/Bleecker Street, 2016) happens tonight. We’re all presuming that Kevin Spacey will deliver a better-than-decent Richard Nixon, and that Michael Shannon‘s Elvis…who knows? But the supporting cast looks great — Alex Pettyfer, Colin Hanks, Evan Peters, Johnny Knoxville, Sky Ferreira and Tracy Letts. Unless it’s a disaster I’m presuming Elvis & Nixon will have its first peek-out at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival.

How many of us have visited the Oval Office, or even the West Wing of the White House? I’ll almost certainly never go there, but I’ve visited highly detailed, movie-set recreations of the Kennedy and Nixon Oval offices, and in a way they were almost cooler than the real thing.

It was 20 years and nine months ago that Oliver Stone and his publicist Stephen Rivers allowed me to pay a brief visit to the Nixon West Wing — Oval Office, cabinet room, hallways, various offices, etc. Production designer Victor Kempster had built the amazingly detailed set (including an outdoor portion with grass and bushes) on a massive Sony sound stage.

I was let in just after Stone and his cast (including Anthony Hopkins) and crew had finished filming. It was sometime around late February or early March of ’95. I wrote up my impressions for an L.A. Times Syndicate piece. Nixon opened on 12.20.95.

A guy asked me this morning if I was going to post some kind of review of Reed Morano‘s Meadowland (Cinedigm, 10.16). My first response: To what end?

Meadowland is about the Big Numb of grief. Grief wanderings, grief enzymes, grief injections. Grief as a huge swimming pool filled with jello and no escape ladders. In short, the kind of movie that you definitely want to visit and immerse yourself in. But don’t listen to me. Listen to Guardian critic Jordan Hoffman, who has called Meadowland “terrific.”

None of Meadowland works unless you buy that a young couple can leave their three- or four-year-old kid inside a bathroom inside a service station with the dad waiting outside, and then the dad knocks on the door and…nothing. The kid just magically disappears. No trace of him here, there, anywhere. And no one ever sees him or reports him. The vanishing. Speaking as a father of two sons I didn’t buy it at all and so the whole movie, for me, was untrustworthy bullshit. A highly indulgent downhead sink-in.

Room Conversation #1: A guy who runs a Los Angeles screening series always asks the attendees (mixed but mostly female, mostly in their 50s, 60s and 70s) to vote for their favorites at the end of each nine-week term. He told me two days ago that “out of nine films (which included a couple of biggies) Room won with more votes than all the other eight combined.” My response: “I’d like to say ‘to each his own’ despite my negative gut response.”

Portion of a huge cardboard standee for Room, sitting in the main lobby of Washington, D.C.’s E Street Cinema.

Room Conversation #2: A major print critic from south of the Mason-Dixon line wrote me yesterday. “Finally saw Room tonight,” he wrote. “You were spot-on. I felt fucking trapped in that movie.” My response: “Thank you!”

I landed in Savannah yesterday around 4 pm, give or take. Hello again, 19th Century romance and genteel hospitality and the feeling of being surrounded by history and ghosts. Warmth, ancient trees, flatness, fragrances, serenity. And great food. It’s been lightly raining here but the clouds will begin to push on today, or so I’m told.

By 7 pm I was watching Tom McCarthy‘s Spotlight — yes, again — at the SCAD Trustees theatre on Broughton Street. I sat next to Hollywood Reporter award-season analyst Scott Feinberg, who had just moderated a panel on documentary filmmakers and also interviewed Tab Hunter re Tab Hunter Confidential. We all went to the after-party at Savannah’s Brice Hotel, which happens to be where I’m staying.

Authority figures need to play it firm but cool.  Always.  Even if some kid is giving them toxic attitude. I know this because I was that kid in my teens. Toxic, defiant — a serious animus toward authority. One spring day in my senior year the vice-principal grabbed my arm in order to…I forget but probably take me to his office for some kind of disciplinary session. And I snapped and shoved him away — a major infraction, grounds for possible expulsion. I was suspended that day and the next but the day after I was told I could return to class. The vice-principal, bless him, had decided to forgive and forget. When I realized he’d cut me a break I felt more respect and affection for that guy than I’d ever felt for my dad, at least up to that point. That God for compassion. Comment:  I’ve no idea what that 16 year-old girl did to piss off Officer Ben Fields, but it probably wasn’t much. She probably told him to go fuck himself, and he saw red. Officer Fields, in any event, is getting schooled right now by the Twitterverse, and is now the newest member of the Famous Racists With A Badge Club.

During her promotional rounds for Supergirl, which premiered last night on CBS, Melissa Benoist has been introduced to audiences as Melissa “Ben-oh-wist,” a yokel mispronouncing of her French name.  Not to be outdone, Melissa pronounces it “Ben-oyst.”  In a hipper, more cultivated realm it would be pronounced “Ben-whah.” Benoist is a close relation of Benoit, a Catholic French male name which means “blessed” in old French. Calling her Melissa “Ben-oh-wist” is roughly analogous to pronouncing Alain Delon‘s last name (pronounced “Deh-lawhn”) so that it rhymes with “felon” or pronouncing Maurice Chevalier‘s last name as “Chevahleer” or Isabelle Huppert (pronounced “Hoohpair’) as Isabelle Hupmobile. How hard is it to say “Ben-whah”? Too hard if you’re from Texas, which is where Benoist, 27, hails from. But it’s not just Southerners — most Americans are total rubes when it comes to respecting foreign pronunications.

I took a six-hour stroll last night — U-Street corridor, Georgetown (including Georgetown University, the gated, two-story brick home in which Chris and Regan McNeil lived during The Exorcist plus the Exorcist steps plus a self-guided tour of Georgetown homes that JFK lived in between ’46 and January ’61), across the bridge into Virginia, down to the Arlington cemetery and back across.

I walked down and back up the Exorcist steps last night. You can’t leap out of Regan McNeil’s second-story bedroom window and onto the steps — way too far.

3307 N Street in Georgetown, where JFK lived from ’57 through January ’61.

Older women didn’t come out in sufficient numbers to support Sarah Gavron‘s Suffragette last weekend, and as a result the Focus Features release is now being assessed as an under-performer. The idiotic analogizing of box-office heat with artistic validation also means that Carey Mulligan‘s entirely deserving Best Actress campaign is now regarded as being in a cool-down mode. Despite the fact that (a) Mulligan is one of our finest actresses (right at the top, unquestionably Streep– and Blanchett-level) and (b) this is her finest performance since An Education. Brilliant!

The following was posted yesterday by Thompson on Hollywood‘s By Tom Brueggemann: “A year ago Pride, a retelling of the struggle for equal rights with a much lower marketing and awards profile than Suffragette‘s, grossed around $75,000/$15,000 PTA for its five New York/Manhattan theaters (it also opened in five other cities) on its way to a sub-$2 million national total.

“While Suffragette‘s total at a little under $20,000 PTA (at very prime theaters) is best for the weekend, it is very ordinary for the advance festival and awards league territory and has to be considered disappointing compared to expectations and where it needs to be even as a Best Actress contender for rave-reviewed Carey Mulligan.

James Vanderbilt‘s Truth has been accused of fudging facts so many times that I’ve lost count. Okay, maybe not that many but it’s definitely been Zero Dark Thirty‘ed, as I predicted it would be. One result is that it’s all but dead as an award-season contender. On top of which after ten days of theatrical play (or as of 10.25) in a maximum of 18 theatres Truth has earned a completely pathetic $213K. So if anything a 10.23 attack piece by Bloomberg‘s Megan McArdle seems a bit superfluous as the movie’s been finished for at least a week.

I’ve nonetheless sent the following email to McArdle:

“Megan — I love your idea of re-thinking or re-scrambling Truth and coming up with a better hero than Mary Mapes. But who would that be? Karl Rove? Bill Burkett? Burkett’s wife?

“Your piece focuses entirely on the probably inauthentic Killian memos, and how their lack of authenticity means that (a) Mary Mapes destroyed herself, (b) the movie is basically horseshit and (c) James Vanderbilt was taken in by a really bad source and has therefore suffered (or is suffering) the same fate as Mapes.

“You understand, I’m sure, as clearly as I do that the film is not saying that the Killian memos used on the original 60 Minutes segment were irrefutable.  The film clearly says that Mapes and Rather and their immediate supervising producers screwed up, but also that the story about George Bush being derelict during his National Guard Service was true, which is what Mapes’ basic point is throughout the film.